Video art

Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. (It should not however be confused with television production or experimental film.) Video art came into existence during the early 1960s and early 1970s as the new technology became available outside corporate broadcasting and is still practiced and has given rise to the use of video installations. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast, viewed in galleries or streamed online, distributed as video tapes or DVD discs or digital files; sculptural installations, which may incorporate one or more television sets or video monitors, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sounds; and performances in which video representations are included.[1]

Video art is named after the original analog video tape, which was most commonly used in the form's early years, but before that artists had already been working in film. With the advent of digital technology (Hard Disk, CD-ROM, DVD, and solid state) this superseded tape but the electronic video signal remains the carrier of moving image work. Despite obvious parallels and relationships, video art is not experimental film.

One of the key differences between video art and theatrical cinema is that video art does not necessarily rely on many of the conventions that define theatrical cinema. Video art may not employ the use of actors, may contain no dialogue, may have no discernible narrative or plot, or adhere to any of the other conventions that generally define motion pictures as entertainment. This distinction is important, because it delineates video art not only from cinema but also from the subcategories where those definitions may become muddy (as in the case of avant garde cinema or short films). Video art's intentions are varied, from exploring the boundaries of the medium itself (e.g., Peter Campus, Double Vision) to rigorously attacking the viewer's expectations of video as shaped by conventional cinema (e.g., Joan Jonas, Organic Honey's Vertical Roll).

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In 1958 Wolf Vostell becomes the first artist who incorporates a television set into one of his works in the installationBlack Room Cycle.[2]Transmigracion 1-3, 1958, are also early works with incorpareted television. In 1963 Wolf Vostell exhibited the installation 6 TV Dé-coll/age[3] at the Smolin Gallery in New York. Also in 1963 Wolf Vostell made the video Sun in your head.

Nam June Paik had his first exhibition with manipulated TV in 1963 at the Gallery Parnass in Wuppertal.[4] Video art is often said to have begun when Nam June Paik used his new SonyPortapak to shoot footage of Pope Paul VI's procession through New York City in the autumn of 1965 (although the Sony Rover Portapak was not available until 1967, so Paik clearly used a different machine).[5] That same day, across town in a Greenwich Village cafe, Paik played the tapes and video art was born. The French artist Fred Forest has also used a Sony Portapak since 1967. Both these claims are however often rigorously disputed because the first SonyPortapak, the Videorover did not become commercially available until 1967, first in the US (Fred Forest does not contradict this, saying it was provided to him by the manufacturers[6]) and that Andy Warhol is credited with showing underground video art mere weeks before Paik's papal procession screening, but here probably made on a pre-portable mains deck.

Prior to the introduction of this new technology, moving image production was only available to the consumer (or the artist for that matter) by way of eight or sixteen millimeter film, but did not provide the instant playback that video tape technologies offered. Consequently, many artists found video more appealing than film, even more so when the greater accessibility was coupled with technologies which could edit or modify the video image.

The two examples mentioned above both made use of "low tech tricks" to produce early video art works. American artist Peter Campus' Double Vision combined the video signals from two Sony Portapaks through an electronic mixer, resulting in a distorted and radically dissonant image and Jonas' Organic Honey's Vertical Roll involved recording previously recorded material as it was played back on a television — with the vertical hold setting intentionally in error.

An early multi-channel video art work (using several monitors or screens) was Wipe Cycle by Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette. Wipe Cycle was first exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1969 as part of an exhibition titled "TV as a Creative Medium". An installation of nine television screens, Wipe Cycle combined live images of gallery visitors, found footage from commercial television, and shots from pre-recorded tapes. The material was alternated from one monitor to the next in an elaborate choreography.

Valie Export's groundbreaking video piece, "Facing a Family" (1971) was one of the first instances of television intervention and broadcasting video art. The video, originally broadcast on the Austrian television program "Kontakte" February 2, 1971,[11] shows a bourgeois Austrian family watching TV while eating dinner. When other middle-class families watched this program on TV, the television would be holding a mirror up to their experience and complicating the relationship between subject, spectator, and television.[7]

Although it continues to be produced, it is represented by two varieties: single-channel and installation. Single-channel works are much closer to the conventional idea of television, or cinema screen: a video is screened, projected or shown as a single image. Installation works involve either an environment, several distinct pieces of video presented separately, or any combination of video with traditional media such as sculpture. Installation video is the most common form of video art today.[citation needed] Sometimes it is combined with other media and is often subsumed by the greater whole of an installation or performance or new media art or Internet art. Contemporary contributions are being produced at the crossroads of other disciplines such as installation, architecture, design, sculpture, electronic art, VJ (video performance artist) and digital art or other documentative aspects of artistic practice.

The digital video "revolution" of the 1990s has given wide access to sophisticated editing and control technology, allowing many artists to work with video and to create interactive installations based on video. Some examples of recent trends in video art include entirely digitally rendered environments created with no camera and video that responds to the movements of the viewer or other elements of the environment. The Internet has also been used to allow control of video in installations from the World Wide Web or from remote locations.